Michael Barbaro

So these two lawyers, Gunasekara and Brightbill, they are ensuring that this cause of rolling back environmental regulations, of going after the endangerment finding, that it gets taken up by a major conservative think tank in Heritage with a ton of influence in Republican politics.

Exactly right.

Then in tandem, we have two other lawyers, much more high-profile figures, who are working in their own right to bring down the endangerment finding.

And who is that?

Russ Vogt and Jeff Clark.

Much better known.

Much better known figures.

Russell Vogt, as we know, during the Biden years, starts a think tank of his own, the Center for Renewing America, where they were keeping the MAGA movement alive.

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Clark has been in the fight against the endangerment finding for decades.

Before there ever was an endangerment finding, he went to court to argue that the EPA...

doesn't have and shouldn't have the legal authority to address greenhouse gases.

It doesn't matter to EPA if it's absurd, if its regulations are going to lead to absurd consequences that inflict massive harm on the national economy.

He loses that.

And that, from everything we have been told, is really a motivating factor for years with Jeff Clark, what he sees as righting a wrong.

Of course, the other thing Jeff Clark is known for, and I think a lot of our listeners will remember this, is that at the end of the first Trump term, he emerges from deep within the Justice Department as an ally of President Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election, so much so...

that Trump briefly considers making him the acting attorney general.

And that so scares people at the Department of Justice that many of them threaten to quit.

If it happens, President backs down.

But Clark becomes known as a major election denier.